Certain ground vehicles, such as those utilized in military and similar applications use hybrid electric technology including high voltage DC power generating. Due to their high inherent power density, synchronous permanent magnet generators are frequently utilized in this type of application when weight and/or size are important parameters.
A typical electrical power system architecture for such an application includes an unregulated permanent magnet generator coupled to a boost pulse width modulated power converter that acts as an active rectifier. Also included in the typical electrical power system is a high voltage battery or other high energy storage device. In some applications, the near constant power load over the duration of the operating time is coupled with high peak loads. To support the peak power requirements, re-chargeable high energy storage batteries are utilized.
When the high energy storage batteries become drained during peak load operations, a monitoring system detects the low energy. Then, during standard operations at a base load, a generator control unit routes at least a portion of the power from the unregulated permanent magnet generator to the DC bus including the high energy storage batteries, and all the high energy storage batteries are simultaneously re-charged.